LAUSR

chapters three through six. Semblances denote Massumi’s apparent appearance that deviates from reality, which reflects but deviates and points to reality at moments of crisis when they fade. Assemblages denote the complex actor network theory (ANT), that is, like networks that characterize global financial real estate investors. Drawing on Saskia Sassen, assemblages refer to global financial real estate investors wielding technologies enmeshed in knowledge systems. These assemblages are global, transcend sovereign national territory, and are difficult to apprehend, regulate, or stop. They are dynamic, with the use of technologies altering knowledge systems, and knowledge systems governing the use of technologies. The seventh and eighth chapters take on new discursive codes and global real estate assemblages. In these chapters, Rogers takes a digital humanities approach to analyzing the rise of real estate technology. He describes global online residential real estate marketed to retail customers in fascinating detail. He conceptualizes the rise of digitized real estate professionals as cyborgs; the free-market libertarian undercurrents of cyberspace, and the uploading of real estate into digital commodities as investor-focused digital acts. Rather than relying on a problematic reversed metaphor of colonization of the West by the East, Rogers compellingly describes this moment as one in which real estate technics of the settler-colonial era are being hard-coded into proprietary digital technologies, unlocking possibilities for housing equity. It is the interlacing of ideologies, technological affordances, and markets that make these technologies so effective. Near the end of the book, Rogers suggests making real estate data open source, publicly available, and free. However, this suggestion seems to contradict the discussion in chapter seven of the free-market libertarian undercurrents of cyberspace, and discussions in chapter four of the emergence of deed and titling systems to increase the transparency of transactions and the clarity of title to facilitate faster and more seamless real estate transactions. While this recommendation in some ways follow from the analysis Rogers has provided, it also runs afoul of issues of power and the production of knowledge discussed throughout the book, raising questions of how exactly one might democratize the exercise of power over real estate by making real estate data open source, publicly available, and free. This book is ambitious and packed with dense theory. While occasionally difficult to follow, it is ultimately thought-provoking and rewarding. Rogers traverses a lot of terrain, referencing a complex critical apparatus drawing on a dizzying array of theorists, and historical examples that span the globe and recorded history. There are occasional weak spots in his use of historical examples to unpack his analytical concepts. For example, his treatment of US banking history seems imprecise. Rogers discusses real estate titling systems that are part of the state as though they were part of the financial system. Similarly, he refers to banks and the financial industry as though they are interchangeable, even during the subprime lending phase in the 1990s and 2000s when non-banks were dominant actors. Perhaps as a result, this close reading of episodes in US banking does not yield as much analytic insight as some readers might hope and he does not develop a concept of banking or financial intermediation as a technology with any more specificity than to say that banking and real estate are interrelated, and that they have a discursive relationship. Rogers’ strength is his insistence on developing a theory that is grounded and historically specific to this moment and in the theoretical framework itself, particularly when he deploys it to situate phenomena such as globalization and the rise of digital technologies in an analysis of contemporary real estate. As the real estate business moves from back room deals and personality-driven negotiations of the past into a more quantitative, digitized system, the digital humanities approach that Rogers discusses yields interesting, policyrelevant suggestions.